What is Content Marketing?

There are a lot of ways to market online.

So many, in fact, that we’ve created an entire business around educating people on the ins-and-outs of digital marketing. One aspect of digital marketing that we talk about almost daily at DigitalMarketer is content marketing.

Why are we always talking about content marketing?

Because right now, it’s everywhere.

It’s on every website you visit, social profile you scroll through, and even in this article that you’re reading right now.

Content marketing is a big deal, and rightfully so.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing builds an audience of future customers, engages them so they’re motivated to buy your product, and then continues to interact with them so they can become brand ambassadors for your business. 

This is a topic we cover in full detail in our article, Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Content Marketing, but for now we’ll give you the basics.

Content marketing publishes content (see, this isn’t so overwhelming, right?) for future and current customers. 

There are different types of content that you can publish:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Email newsletters
• Ebooks
• Physical books
• Other types of newsletters
• Images

For example, remember the infamous Squatty Potty YouTube commercial from the Harmon Brothers in 2015 (viewed over 35 million times)?

At DigitalMarketer we publish an annual Infographic, as part of our content marketing strategy, that highlights our year:

And Robinhood, the financial services company, posts weekly 3-4 minute long podcast episodes about the investment world called Robinhood Snacks Minute:

What Kind of Content Should YOU Publish?

What kind of content should you publish? That’s easy. The kind your audience wants to consume.

Your customer avatar is the person that you created your product for. They’re the person who needs your product to improve their life and bring them from a “bleh” before-state to a “yay!” after-state.

Each avatar wants to consume content differently. For example, let’s say that your customer avatar is a new mom and you’re selling a state-of-the-art pacifier that is somehow monumentally different than those that already exist on the market. 

Pop Quiz time…

Should you create a 3,000 word article on how to soothe your baby to sleep (promoting your pacifier as a way to do so) or a 5-minute video with 10 tips to get your baby to fall asleep?

If you answered the latter, you’re correct. But why does this 5-minute video work better for new moms than the 3,000 word article?

Because new moms are busy. They are spending 99.9% of their time taking care of a new human and the last thing they have time for is reading a 3,000 word article in the hopes that it will answer their biggest problem. 

They want their answer, and they want it now; so this customer avatar is going to gravitate toward the shortest, least time consuming way to get the answer to their problem.

On the other hand, let’s say your customer avatar is a new entrepreneur who is starting a business. Your product is a business academy that teaches them how to file as an official corporation. Does this customer avatar want a 5-minute video that quickly talks about the different options for having a business (sole proprietorship, LLC, partnership, etc.)?

No way. They want to know what each of these terms mean for their business and which business type is best for their company. This customer avatar is going to happily read through a 3,000 word article over listening to a 5-minute video.

Knowing your customer avatar is essential to creating the right content marketing strategy.

Why Do You Need Content Marketing?

You need content marketing if you want to have:

1. A new customer-generating system
2. A relationship with existing customers

A New Customer-Generating System (And Example)

Your content marketing strategy is going to bring more customers to your doorstep (physically or virtually) by giving them a reason to visit your website, follow your social media accounts, or subscribe to your newsletter or podcast.

It’s hard to convince somebody that they should read your blog post if it’s a 1,000-word pitch about how great your product is. Would you read the whole article?

Most likely not. Because unless you’ve already bought the product and now want to know the ins-and-outs of using it—you don’t care about the product.

You just care about getting the solution to your problem.

Your content needs to help your customer with solving part of their main problem. For example, this article is solving the problem that you have: not knowing exactly what content marketing is.

It’s not a pitch for DigitalMarketer’s products.

BUT, as part of our content marketing strategy, this article perfectly aligns with the products that we have that will solve your content marketing problems. For example, 

• The DM Insider newsletter is going to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening in marketing (including content marketing) on a weekly basis
• If you wanted to take your marketing knowledge a step further, you could take one of our marketing courses taught by the best marketers in the industry
• And, if you wanted access to all of that knowledge (from social media ads to copyrighting and creating newsletters), you could become a Lab member and stay on the cutting edge of the current state of marketing

So this article is a way for us to show you that we are marketing experts, and if THIS is the type of content we’ll give you for free. Can you imagine what we put behind our membership?

That’s how you generate new customers through your content marketing strategy.

A Relationship with Existing Customers (And Example)

Remember when we said that content marketing can turn current customers into brand ambassadors? This is what we mean by that:

Your current customers can become your sales team, if you treat them right. Each time you get a new customer and you make them thrilled to use your products, they’re going to tell somebody about it.

Think about the cumulative effect of having 1,000 customers…

If these happy customers all told just ONE person about how great your product is, you just found another 1,000 customers without—

• Paying Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social network
• Bidding for ad space on Google
• Paying a marketer to market your products

That’s called free marketing and that’s the best kind of marketing. Not just because it’s free, but because it means you’re doing a great job at creating solutions to your customers’ problems.

So, while content marketing is great for new customers, you can also use it to turn those current customers into brand ambassadors.

For example, we recently launched our newsletter, the DM Insider. While this was certainly a way to get the attention of our future customers, the first thing we did was make the decision that ALL Lab members at DigitalMarketer would get access to this newsletter.

Why?

They’re already customers and they’re already showing us that they’re happy with our content by continuing their membership to Lab. But, we have the opportunity to make them even happier by giving them more digital marketing content that will help our customer avatar (business owners, agency owners, and marketers) double their business.

And that’s what turns our customers into brand ambassadors, making us one of the top digital marketing education platforms available.

If you want a deep look into the world of content marketing, with tons of examples to get inspiration from, you can read our in-depth article on content marketing here.

Takeaways

1. Content marketing builds an audience of future customers, engages them so they’re motivated to buy your product, and then continues to interact with them so they can become brand ambassadors for your business. 
2. What kind of content should you publish? The kind your audience wants to consume.
3. You need content marketing if you want to have a new customer-generating system and a relationship with existing customers.

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